Used to keep note of proposals to make interaction with the inventory more "what item should I use now?" and less "argh another ring of something S > Y"

A very good post: viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16402&p=224735&hilit=inventory#p224735

Quazifuji wrote:There's been a lot of discussion and radical proposals about making inventory management less tedious, I thought I'd pitch in some less radical and hopefully less controversial ideas that could maybe be implemented in the meantime, since inventory reform seems to be a pretty heated topic that might take a while to sort out (if it ever happens).

There are a bunch of ideas here, but they all come from the same core premise: it is optimal to walk around with a full inventory most of the time, because inventory slots can essentially represent tactical options in combat and having more tactical options is better. However, walking around with a full inventory leads to some annoying scenarios. Most of these scenarios either involve some awkward inventory shuffling when you find a new item you might want, or auto-explore being annoying with autopickup when your inventory's full. I think putting all of these changes in would make having a full inventory vastly less annoying.

1. Allow ID scrolls to be used on items on the floor. If I find an unidentified item while my inventory is full, and I want to identify it with a scroll, it is currently a 4-step process: I have to drop a different item, pick it up, use a scroll on it, the determine if I want to keep it or swap it again for the item I dropped. If you could ID items that are on the floor, the first two steps of this process would be eliminated.

2. Make items that auto-ID on pickup (wands and books) auto-ID when you step on them instead. Similar to change 1. Finding an unIDed wand or book with a full inventory is a 3-step process (drop something else, pickup to ID, determine which to keep) that could be reduced to a one-step process.

3. Let scrolls and potions be used from the ground. Another "turn a 4-step process (drop item, pick up consumable, use consumable, pick up dropped item) into a one-step process (use consumable)" suggestion. Food already works this way, why not potions and scrolls?

4. Make the "cannot pick up item" prompts for autoexplore happen when you land on the item, instead of when you try to autoexplore while standing on the item. I think this one's a bit more debatable, might work better as an rc file option. Right now, every time you auto-explore while your inventory is full and encounter and item on autopickup, it interrupts auto-explore. If you try to auto-explore again, it prompts you whether you want to continue or not. Personally, I would find it better and less awkward if it prompted me at the end of the autoexplore when I landed on the item, instead of when trying to start an explore while standing on it.

5. Add a third option to the "cannot pick up item" autoexplore prompt that turns off auto-pickup for the item. The "cannot pick up item" message it also annoying when it's an item that you don' want. This can be solved by going into the menu and micromanaging your auto-explore options, but sometimes I forget or my preferences change. It would be nice if, when encountering the prompt, I could have a third option besides "yes" or "no" for "no, and turn off autopickup for this item" to make things a bit simpler. This way, I don't have to periodically dig through the autopickup menu to modify my changes, and instead can just respond appropriately when the prompt shows up.

6. Add an option to let chunks be picked up automatically upon butchering, but not on autopickup. It's nice to have chunks automatically get picked up when I butcher something if I have room. It's annoying if I leave chunks behind because my inventory's full and autoexplore prompts me about it. I'd like to have an option where chunks get picked automatically when I butcher something if I have room, but are otherwise ignored.

Stuff I support:

- Remove Spellbook inventory slotsviewtopic.php?f=8&t=22303Status: the Devs seem OK with it, but it needs a patch that also removes Trog book burning.

- Show numerical value of rings whose kind you have already identified ("you see here a ring of slaying +4)viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22295Status: currently no Dev comment.

- Remove food inventory slots: have food be visible when hitting e.g. the e button, but not take room in the inventory.viewtopic.php?f=8&t=22382Status: ?

Lasty wrote:I already have a patch for that on the ranged reform branch. The branch as a whole is still in progress.

- Remove arrows and boltsviewtopic.php?f=17&t=22344My opinion is that it would be better to keep them because they make the early game more interesting because they are limited, but they should be visible in the Q menu and not take inventory slots, and also be visible near the name of weapons which use them: "i - a +2 shortbow (30 arrows)".Status: ?

Stuff I am thinking about:

- Removing doubles. 1. One example are teleport items ( viewtopic.php?f=17&t=22391 ). 2. Papilio noticed the ring and potion of flight. I think they both could be substituted by a wand of flight, which would in theory be a small buff to mummies and DD, but I think in practice wouldn't change anything balance-wise, besides the fact that mummies would be spared the annoying interaction of putting on the ring each time they want to levitate.

- Kill scrolls of randomness, or make them do something.

- A very nebulous wand reform. Stacking? ---> currently trunk has no wands of HW, Tele or Haste. I think that's nice, although it's a hit to mummies, and Tele was handy for everyone to escape silence.

More stuff, that I don't support or think needs work:

- Expand inventory slots by dividing inventory to subcategories; All subcategories have equal limit of 52 slots (a~Z), therefore total limit of item slots would be 208.viewtopic.php?f=17&t=22139I don't support it because it's too much stuff. It streamlines the pick up part, but not the use of what you actually have in your pockets, especially for new players, who would have a lot of items and problems having an overview of what they can do.Inventory expansion:By 26:viewtopic.php?f=8&t=10141&p=139929&hilit=inventory#p139929

Having two inventories, one for consumables and one for non consumables:viewtopic.php?f=8&t=16318&p=223366&hilit=inventory#p223366As tested in a fork:viewtopic.php?f=8&t=19227&p=260634&hilit=inventory#p260634

- Merge potions of might and cure mutationviewtopic.php?f=8&t=22389I understand the reasoning behind it, but the idea itself is rather strange because of how different the effects are (which is at the same time its strong and weak point).

Last edited by Shtopit on Wednesday, 21st December 2016, 02:33, edited 1 time in total.

FWIW, an easier method of searching the forums involves using the "site:" prefix in google. "site:crawl.develz.org" usually does a better job of finding things for me than the forum's search, though you'd want to narrow the search down from just "inventory"

Shtopit wrote:- Kill scrolls of randomness, or make them do something.

what problem would this solve?

From the inventory point of view, the fact that they just take up space. You can also find them pretty late, when you are already full, and force you to stop because of auto pick up and waste some time identifying them, which is annoying.

In general, I see a problem in that they, well, do nothing. Back in the day they were useful for training spellcasting. Nowadays, however, they just do nothing. There's only one case in which a scroll that doing nothing is relevant in the game: when you are frantically reading the scrolls in your inventory, hoping that one of them will help you out. However, this means that you only have 1 chance out of 21 to read a scroll of random uselessness while looking for something else, and that only happens once in a game, and not in all games.

It's also worse than scrolls of noise or potion of degeneration in a game perspective, because these items create a problem for you against which you have to fight (calling monsters or reducing your capabilities). Random uselessness is just an uninteresting entry to be deleted from the identified items list, with no bearing on anything else.

Make brilliance, agility and might into a single potion with all of their effects. It would be an all-around useful item, open up new options for hybrids, and take less inventory room. (I can't remember who suggested this one.)

I'd love to see a "drop and exclude from auto-pickup" option mapped to some key combo, very much like the current drop command. Same for shift+d for dropping the most recently picked item and excluding it. At the very least, an option to "drop and exclude" in the item details window.

On the other hand, I'm against anything that directly or indirectly increases max inventory space. The current max is good, forcing you to make strategic decisions regarding what to carry and what to leave behind. Increasing the max wouldn't stop players who like doing it from hoarding everything they come across into a neat lair stash.In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing the max inventory size reduced further, but I know I'd be in the minority here.The exception are nemlex's decks. Presently they are terribly annoying to inventory manage and the reason i never pick that god.

Start the game with all wands already identified.It is functionally the same as identification on pick-up, but you are spared the inventory hassle if it's full. It also allows to change autopickup settings for all wands at the start of the game. Leave charge identification as it is now.

The advantage is that it's easier to remember what you have in your inventory, the disadvantage is that stacking, which is unfun, becomes more important.It wouldn't really be drastic, anyway - 6 kinds of food + 3 to 12 items equipped + missiles + spellbooks + 26 = around 40 items, I think, depending on race and background.If crawl destroyed discarded items, you wouldn't have stacking, but choosing what to pick up would take much longer. If all items were destroyed when you leave a floor, and you were proposed with a list of items and an easy to use interface to choose what to keep and what to discard, these choices would still take too much time, and there also would be too many items.I also think that making equipped items not take up room would work if there were a different GUI.

When trying to equip a 2H weapon with a shield, add an option to take the shield off and equip the weapon.You can't equip that with a shield! Do you want to take off your +2 buckler and equip your +0 uncursed greatsword? (Y/N)

papilio wrote:How on earth can reducing inventory make crawl better???

By reducing the item slots available to characters, you increase the importance item selection has to character survival.

Imagine if, instead of having a golf bag overflowing with random junk that *may* aid your survival later, you were forced to choose from something like 5 to 10 items to carry (beyond equipment slots, which could also stand to be reduced) while leaving the rest behind to be destroyed when you leave the floor?

Item selection would become important to survival, instead of the mere background annoyance of periodically looking over your inventory to determine which least-useful junk should be dropped. See DoomRL for one example of a roguelike with this kind of system.

Such an effort would be best accompanied by a merging and general reduction of item types for the sake of usability. There have been earlier posts on this topic; I won't bother with a forum search to link them here.

If there's one thing I'd change about crawl it's the inventory management system.

It's so annoying when you keep getting messages about "your pack is full", "you can't carry that many items" and having to keep making marginal decisions about which is the least useful item , especially when the restrictions don't seem to bear any resemblance to reality, e.g. you can somehow stuff 200 more large rocks into your bag if you have some already, but you can't possibly fit in a few more needles!

I always the Depths to be a problem, since by that time you've generally branched out from your main build and so you need extra equipment, you want to do as much raiding as you can and then worry about inventory, and you're not usually strong enough to take the hell vestibule. So you have to keep ditching stuff, Id-ing stuff etc. in mid-clearance, which totally interrupts the flow!

<Sequell> Zargon is a greatplayer!<Sequell> Zargon is a greaterplayer!Online scoring

My main goal in reducing inventory to 26 slots would be to make there be so many goddamn things in the inventory screen. The secondary goal would be to make it so, for example, Dr doesn't get two extra inventory slots compared to Hu, which is a little bit silly.

But mostly it's because the thought of paging through a full 52-item inventory 100 times makes me think "I could be playing some other game right now"

I am not a very good player. My mouth is a foul pit of LIES. KNOW THIS.

Another advantage of having fewer slots would be differentiation between games. Let's assume that you have 26 slots, and that there are 100 item types in total, of which 50 can deeply change the way you play. You can't carry them all with you. Games will be much different, based on what you choose to carry.

I actually find it a bit difficult to tell what these game-changers could be. Right now, there are weapon types, that change how you handle positioning; body armour, that influences your magic proficiency; certain brands, like vampirism, that push you towards being more aggressive. High regen and high SH with reflect are occasionally in this category.

Many other things are simply counters (potions and scrolls) or too rarely usable to build a way of playing around them. Some others require too many factors (rings of fire assume that you have fire spells memorized and that you are using a light enough armour to use them).

Actually, a system in which items are so decisive in shaping your character would go against the skill system of Crawl. But I think that Crawl might be too attached to items for certain things anyway. The fact that you need to find spells, for example, seems quite harsh to me: you might pump up your fire magic or transmutations and never find high level spells of these schools, for example. But I guess that this doesn't have anything to do with inventory management.

Mix cancellation and curing. There is some difference between the potions, but imho not enough to justify the existence of two different items. Cancellation is also very seldom used, and its distinctive ability to lower contamination is too weak for a rare potion, while it would be good for curing - "would you rather stop glowing or lose three potions that also cure poison, confusion and other stuff?"

Shtopit wrote:Mix cancellation and curing. There is some difference between the potions, but imho not enough to justify the existence of two different items. Cancellation is also very seldom used, and its distinctive ability to lower contamination is too weak for a rare potion, while it would be good for curing - "would you rather stop glowing or lose three potions that also cure poison, confusion and other stuff?"

so this would mean that to cure poison or confusion you also have to cancel any active buffs you have?

Shtopit wrote:Mix cancellation and curing. There is some difference between the potions, but imho not enough to justify the existence of two different items. Cancellation is also very seldom used, and its distinctive ability to lower contamination is too weak for a rare potion, while it would be good for curing - "would you rather stop glowing or lose three potions that also cure poison, confusion and other stuff?"

I honestly had not thought of the debuffing effects of cancellation. In theory it would cause "interesting tactical choices", but, in practice, it would make the potion less usable in the early game, when e.g. might can be important against adders.

About cancellation and new mut, I am not sure that it will be more important. Contamination is quite rare, outside of postend. At least this is the impression I had from learndb, I play locally and so I haven't tried trunk.

Remove stones from inventory. Turn them into an always available infinite thrown ammo type.

Stones have two purposes: to be thrown and to be consumed for earth spells. They however are too readily available to count as a limiting factor: bullets, arrows and bolts are all much rarer. I think it would be better if stones didn't take inventory room and, instead, they were the default quivered option, always available in infinite supply. This could also make slings a bit more desirable.

Monsters could randomly generate with a certain quantity of throwable stones in their inventory, that always are destroyed after use.

Add this, remove rings of fire and ice. Reasoning: there is no reason for only two elemental schools to have a ring enhancer; pidgeonholing a ring to a single school makes it unappealing to most characters, while a more generalist ring is useful for more; the function of enhancer for an individual spell school is already absolved by staves; the way they are now, elemental rings only have useful resistances if used in areas like ice cavern, since they are too dangerous to wear in normal conditions, which turns them into ultra-swappy rings.

Make wands stack. I'm not a big fan myself, but it's frequently proposed. I don't think that being able to easily throw 40 x bolts in a row is a good thing. However, it technically already is possible, you just need to give up about 4 inventory slots to do it. Wands probably need some sort of deep reform, but I have no idea of which one it could be. One option is that of making all of current effects into evocable abilities in items, like +blink. So a fighter could have a cloak of acid bolt, or boots of confusion. The question then is how they would be recharged: piety, XP, MP, HP, scrolls of recharging...? Would it require making aux armour more frequent? What would the repercussions on dr, tr, og etc be?Something I'd like is giving artefacts with negative effects the ability to evoke them against enemies. So {conf} artefacts could also be evoked to cause confusion on monsters.

Rast wrote:If this is a problem, every consumable has the same problem.

I thought a bit about this. Wands are different from other evocables, because they always show up with multiple charges, many more than any other consumable which isn't a projectile.So I wonder if it would be a good idea to let wand charges stack after identification, and to treat them like projectiles that need to be quivered before they are used, which would, among other things, allow to activate your readied wand many times in a row without selecting it from i or V. It would be a different quiver from the current one, but would work the same way.

Shtopit wrote:I honestly had not thought of the debuffing effects of cancellation. In theory it would cause "interesting tactical choices", but, in practice, it would make the potion less usable in the early game, when e.g. might can be important against adders.

About cancellation and new mut, I am not sure that it will be more important. Contamination is quite rare, outside of postend. At least this is the impression I had from learndb, I play locally and so I haven't tried trunk.

An important use of !cancellation is to get rid of sentinel's marks. Probably the main thing I use them for, although I'll occasionally use them to deal with contam if i have a lot (of potions) or to deal with petrification in Lair if it's probably going to get me killed and I can't risk teleporting.

Make ring of flight cause white (permanent) flight, remove all other flight items.

Flight isn't important in Crawl. It's a nice perk to have in certain circumstances (a few places in Hell, Shoals, Swamp, some vaults), but it's nowhere near good enough as to have three items that cause it, each with its own mechanic: permanent flight (boots), inexhaustible source with only one application at a time (ring), and strategically limited, freely renewable source (potion).

Effects: if you want flight, you have to sacrifice a ring slot, unless you are a flying race. All races can use permanent flight. Slight buff to octopodes, who, being amphibians, actually won't see much of a difference.

It also solves the "fallen to death" problem, about which some dev was working some time ago, and the "I can't get out of here!" problem when designing vaults.

Inventory items and random transient mutations have bad interaction because they overlap. So they shouldn't. Right now they cause a variety of inventory management burden.

Shtopit wrote:I think that it's random transient mutations that suck.

Mutations rarely do something that inventory items don't. Elemental and magic resists, AC, SH, Gourmet, regeneration, EV, flight all do something that non-artifact items do. If your mutations are stable, you can count on them and select which items to carry. So you leave your ring of rF if you have the rF mutation. However, if they aren't stable, well, you better still carry the items around, just in case the mutations disappear when you need them! And, tbh, it's not very funny to keep pressing A in case something disappeared and you didn't notice it, especially with Jivvy's constant flush of rather irrelevant messages. And, if they actually changed, it isn't very funny to keep swapping the items you are using.

I get that random transient mutations are supposed to create a rainbow-changing character. However, the way in which they interact with the inventory is bad.

duvessa wrote:Just remove wands already. They create tons of inventory clutter, their identification mechanic is obtuse and pointless, the only one with a unique impact on the game is digging and you can always turn digging into a different consumable if you want to save it. The rest are overly similar to existing conjuration/hex spells except consumable, and Crawl already has a zillion consumables.

watertreatmentRL wrote:Removing wands sounds good to me, but it's not like random effects and flame have to generate normally in the dungeon just because of Ar. It's totally possible to make those wands exclusive to the Ar start.

late edit: Somehow forgot to say.... hellcrawl has stacking wands without the id nonsense. Along with removing lots of junk items from dcss, like food, id scrolls, curse scrolls, potions/scrolls of uselessness, etc. you generally don't have to think about running out of inventory slots until over half way through a game and you don't have to keep dropping things every other minute of play after you reach that point. It is a massive improvement over dcss. You get much fewer charges in hellcrawl though.

My proposal:

- Stack wands- Lower total charges by a lot- Lower wand types this way:Wand of confusion, paralysis, domination > go together in a wand of hexing that randomly chooses one of these effects. Make triggering domination depend on tension: higher = more likely. Wand of disintegration, digging, acid and lighting > go together in a wand of zotbolt (irresistible, unmitigated damage that drills holes into walls)Wand of clouds, scattershot, and cloud > go together in a wand of freezing cloudRemove flame and random, maybe with the exception of starting items for Ar and Xom gifts.

duvessa wrote:I'd rather remove stones altogether, and not have effectively infinite throwing ammo available. You need to get rid of awkward throwing too for this to work, of course.

But this removes that interesting decision that every one of my characters comes up against in mid-lair: I really need another potion that I probably won't need to actually quaff. Do I drop that unidentified but possibly useful wand of random effects, OR my stack of 587 stones.

I find this is an excrutiating choice, every time. Please make an unironic tier list of inventory clutter.

When I started this thread, v. 19 had been recently released, and now we are at v. 21. I think it's worth taking a retrospective look at how things have changed.

Things that have been integrated, or significant changes that affected inventory interaction:

Allow ID scrolls to be used on items on the floor

Make items that auto-ID on pickup (wands and books) auto-ID when you step on them instead.

Let scrolls and potions be used from the ground.

Wand stacking, new ID for wands, some removals. (11 wands total)

Rod removal/transformation

New potions of mutation (18 potions total, counting degen and blood).

Food reduced to 1 item type + chunks

Dragons drop full scales instead of enchantable hides (or was that already in 0.19?).

There probably are more, which I have grown so used to, to the point of forgetting that they are recent innovations.

Item changes that would imho make sense in the future:

Merge might, agility and brilliance into a single potion that is good for all character types.

Merge enchant armour and enchant weapon.

Give permanent flight to ring of flight, remove potion of flight. Have randarts and other equippables also always have permanent flight.

Goldify books. All discovered spells can go into their own list (M), with the option for the player of highlighting some and hiding the others if it becomes overwhelming.

Inventory interaction changes that would be nice:

Fast removal from autopickup, in the (d)rop menu and when standing over an item marked for autopickup.

When trying to equip a 2H weapon with a shield, add an option to take the shield off and equip the weapon.

Code:

You can't equip that with a shield! Do you want to take off your +2 buckler and equip your +0 uncursed greatsword instead? (Y/N)

Except Xom and chaotic gods, have god gifts spawn already identified.

Make scarf ID work like amulet ID.

Removal of some item clutter. Duvessa e.g. noticed how most wizards are guaranteed to drop robes. No one will even examine them, unless they are blue, and basic robes cover other items dropped in the same tile.